Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

“I don’t know how to do it, though,” she said.

Now the teenager’s face hardened. “You don’t know how to do it?” he asked, as if Josie, in her ignorance, had no right to pilot a magnificent craft like the Chateau, had no right to carry feces within. The teenager then drew a horrible and pornographic picture of a long thick tube extending from the side of the RV and snaking into a hole in the ground. “The waste should just shoot down into the tank from here to there,” he said, drawing arrows moving up and down.

The teenager’s drawing was benign, even beautiful, compared to the reality, which first required Josie to remove a twelve-foot white tube, inexplicably ribbed, from the bumper of the Chateau. It was stored there, tastefully hidden, a long cylinder tucked inside a long rectangle. She held it gingerly, knowing that unknown volumes of the waste of strangers — of Stan and his white-carpet wife! — had passed through. How could she know if there were leaks? Who could vouch for the end-to-end integrity of the shit-cylinder? She pulled it all out from the bumper, as it came and came, like a giant earthworm.

She attached one end to the right-sized opening on the bottom of the Chateau, just below the feces tank, and then dropped the other end into the hole in the ground, the cleanout. All she had to do now was turn the small and fragile lever that opened the tank and hope, when the human waste went hurtling down the tube, that the tube would stay attached and not fall off, spraying feces everywhere. But that seemed far more likely than it staying somehow fastened amid all that activity, the volume of waste shooting through its thin white membrane.

She reached under the Chateau, under the tank, turned the lever, and leaped to the side. The tube, though, stayed attached through the horrible business of it — the pumping, jerking, the terrifying rush. The jerking was the most unsettling, as the tube, which she realized was far outweighed by the volume of that which it conveyed, jerked and convulsed as the waste passed through in clumps and squirts. The sound was the haunting song of the feces rushing from its halfway house to its final home, not despairing its fate, but joyful and eager.

And then it was over, and all that was necessary was to detach both sides without getting the waste, which no doubt still coated the inside of the tube and the ends especially, on her fingers and shoes, and then replace the twelve feet of tubing, containing so much remembrance of things passed, into the bumper again.

The teenager reappeared. “All gone?”

“All gone,” Josie said.

She followed the teenager into the office, washed her hands in the bathroom and, seeing that the store was stocked with food, bought enough for a week or so. Even stopping at RV parks from then on seemed too risky. They would stay in the Chateau, hidden in woods or valleys. She bought all the store’s peanut butter, all its milk and orange juice and fruit and bread.

She bought a thermos and filled it with coffee, loaded the groceries into the passenger seat, climbed back into the Chateau and started the engine. Standing under the green-white light of the station, the teenager said something to her, but she couldn’t hear it. She cupped her hand to her ear, smiling, hoping that would be the end of it, but instead he jogged around to her window.

“Enjoy the dawn,” he said. The way he said it sounded like a statement of common inclination — that the two of them were united in preferring these small hours, to be alone and apart.

“Right,” she said.

AT SUNRISE there was a sign. PETERSSEN SILVER MINE, 2 MI. They’d been driving for five and a half hours, going north and northwest, and staying off the main roads. A dozen times she’d hit dead ends and closed roads and had turned around, the state seeming determined not to allow her to travel in any direct path. The night finally eased, giving way to grey light. Josie was determined to find an obscure place to park, to hide the Chateau and herself. What she was looking for, really, was a cave, but knew this was too much to ask. A mine seemed a close approximation.

“You guys interested in an old silver mine?” she yelled back to the kids. They’d been asleep all night, and only now were making noises implying they were waking up.

Neither said anything.

“You still asleep?” she asked.

“No,” Ana said.

“Let’s go to a silver mine,” Josie said. She was slap-happy, jittery from the coffee she’d bought from the last gas station and had drunk hot, then warm, then cool, then cold. A vague memory came to her, of her parents taking her to a mine in Oregon. All day she’d caught them kissing in the dark tunnels.

She missed the mine exit the first time, turned around and missed it from the other side. The turnoff was impossibly narrow and the sign was small and painted on wood.

The Chateau rumbled over the dirt road as it turned and climbed into a deep valley. “No one else here,” Josie noted as they made their way two, three, four miles down the dirt road, seeing no sign of human habitation. She’d spent the night thinking to herself, and muttering to herself, and now, with the children ostensibly awake, she could talk out loud and consider it sane.

“Look at this,” she said, “a river. Pretty.”

If the man followed her again, intending to serve her anything, she felt capable of fleeing or doing him harm. If they were alone she was afraid of what she would do to him. She thought of rocks upside his fleshy head, leaving him alone and bleeding in some remote pullout.

She mused over the word mine . What a funny word for the extraction of precious metals from the earth: mine . She thought she would tell her kids her thoughts on this, the very funny confluence of the meanings of mine and mine, and then found herself whispering the words, mine mine mine, and noticed she was smiling. She was far gone.

“I need to sleep,” she said aloud.

The Chateau crossed a narrow steel bridge over a clear shallow river and soon there was another sign, telling them that the mine was three miles ahead. Time and space were bending. They were farther away now than when they left the highway. The landscape was lush with pine and wildflowers and Josie was about to note this by yelling “Pretty” into the back, when she turned to find Paul’s face between the two front seats, alarmingly close to hers.

“Pretty,” she said to him, whispered to him.

Finally they saw a series of slapdash buildings of grey wood and rusted roofs climbing the steep hillside. There was a gate ahead, but it was closed and locked. She parked the Chateau and stepped down, heading to the gate, on which there was a handwritten sign.

CLOSED DUE TO GOVT SHUTDOWN.

NOT OUR FAULT.

Josie got back into the Chateau, told the kids the park was closed, and then informed them that they would go in and walk around anyway. An idea was forming in her mind.

“Can we?” Paul asked.

“Sure,” Josie said.

Ana was delighted.

Josie parked directly in front of the gate, so as to announce to any ranger that might appear that she was not trying to hide from authorities. To them, she wanted to appear to be a mother who had stopped momentarily to show her kids around the old silver mine. They walked around the gate and through the parking lot and saw that there was a bathroom, a tidy one with a newly shingled roof. Paul ran to it and found the doors locked. In seconds he was peeing behind the building.

The mine had been well preserved, in that the park rangers and historians who had been caring for it were allowing it to decompose without much interference. Rusted machinery lay everywhere, as if dropped from a passing plane. There were informative signs along a path that led visitors up to the smelting building, and past the rooming houses and the old offices where the mining company kept their accountants and bookkeepers.